‘Europe is the core – America joined as an offshoot’: the historian challenging what ‘the west’ means

Was the ‘western alliance’ dreamt up to further American and British interests? Georgios Varouxakis argues that the idea is older, quintessentially European, and even anti-imperialistFor your book The West: The History of an Idea, you spent 12 years researching what people mean when they talk about “the west”. At a time when America’s president shows more admiration for autocratic Russia than for Nato-allied countries in Europe, are we witnessing the end of the west as an idea?I certainly wouldn’t write off the west. What we are seeing is a challenge to a version of the west that had America as its leader. But it doesn’t have to signal the end. The west is crucial to Europeans, and they have been the core of it. America joined at some point as an offshoot; it has been isolationist before, and it may become isolationist again. So we may see a different version of the west for a while, with its core in Europe, as it historically has mostly been. But America will surely return sooner or later.A west without America is hard to get one’s head around. When we use that term, most people think of the cold war, and a western alliance led by the Anglosphere … Of course. One common view is that the notion of the west gains traction with the foundation of Nato in 1949 and the cold war. At the other extreme there’s the “from Plato to Nato” idea, which says the west started with ancient Greeks when they fought off the Persians. Meanwhile, among historians, there has been a boringly universal consensus that the west as a self-conscious idea begins in the 1880s or 90s, and is due primarily to the needs of British imperialism: it was invented to justify imperialism, to demarcate the oriental east of Asia and Arab peoples as an “other”. Continue reading...

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